Ext 2.0’s design goal of making it easily extensible has been a rousing success. Witness the frenetic activity in the extensions and plugins forum. Now Steve Skrla from ControlPath has released a Grid Filter plugin that expands greatly on the basic filtering provided by Ext. From the feature list:

Creating of custom filter types and menus is as easy as extending Ext.ux.grid.filter.Filter.

Grid configuration information can be persisted across page loads by passing a stateId parameter.

Packaged with filters for Strings, Numeric Ranges, Date Ranges, Lists (which can be backed by a Ext.data.Store), and Boolean

Nice, it will be so useful in large scale of records, where a keyword for search will lead to many results. But I think it isn’t agile to use filter in a normal number of records. It would be better to build a plugin for implementing smart find dialog like what we have in all desktop applications.
however in my point it’s an awesome idea.

Comment by phpcs — November 27, 2007

Does Ext support virtual grid scrolling?
The demo includes grid paging, but not virtual scrolling (as in Dojo).

Comment by Les — November 27, 2007

Indeed this is awesome stuff! We are using these filters all over the place in our CMS and it makes for a fully featured user experience. Can’t wait to upgrade it all to EXT 2.

Ext: the very definition of fear for Microsoft. Never have I seen web application such as the examples built with Ext 2.0, with such a huge potential for LOB applications.

Comment by Mike — November 27, 2007

@phpcs: “But I think it isnâ€™t agile to use filter in a normal number of records. It would be better to build a plugin for implementing smart find dialog like what we have in all desktop applications.”

An actual implementation of a true “smart find” would be somewhat application-dependent, but this example would be a great starting point.

Comment by Brian — November 28, 2007

Search for FilterAsYouType to see other implementations of the â€œlive searchâ€ concept. FilterAsYouType is a similar concept to “autocomplete”, but autocomplete is usually restricted to finding one target out of many.

FilterAsYouType is intended to subset a potentially large dataset into a smaller subset. This feature can be seen in Firefox under “about:config”.